One major part of the President’s recent shutdown showdown announcement was a dispute over funding to continue construction of the border wall. And the word “continue” is important here because portions of the project are already underway, in addition to the previous submissions of wall design samples. Much of that work took place in Southern California and now the city of San Diego has a message for all of the construction contractors who have taken part in the effort. Don’t bother applying for any more city contracts because you’re going to be on their blacklist. (Free Beacon)

As President Donald Trump renews his battle with Congress to fund his multi-billion-dollar border wall with Mexico, Democratic lawmakers and liberal groups in California have stepped up their campaigns to blacklist businesses involved in building the border wall.

San Diego is the latest city poised to join the list of California municipalities demonstrating their opposition to Trump’s promised border wall by punishing businesses involved in working or even bidding on the wall prototypes or other border-wall projects.

The majority Democratic San Diego City Council, in a 3 to 1 vote last week, directed city officials to draft an ordinance requiring contractors competing for city projects to disclose any past and present work, as well as planned bids, on parts of Trump’s planned border wall.

If you spend all of your time traveling in political circles this might make perfect sense. These are liberal, Democrat-controlled municipalities and they hate the President. Thus they hate the wall. Thus they hate anyone who assists in constructing the aforementioned wall. And since they are the government they respond by using the power of the government over the citizens to punish them.

But stepping outside of the bubble, this move is beyond insanity. It’s actually evil. Government entities which award contracts are supposed to allow qualified companies to bid on jobs on an equal footing. Of course, they make exceptions regularly, offering a built-in advantage to certain companies based on minority or female ownership. They also restrict access to businesses that fail to meet certain safety or equality conditions.

But in this case, they’re going to restrict access to government contracts based on having previously worked on a government contract?

Surely there’s room for a lawsuit from the affected contractors, either individually or as a class action. People sue the government all the time if they don’t win this sort of work, sometimes based on nothing more than a “sense of unfairness.” Assuming the contracts these companies would be bidding for involve construction (which only makes sense), they would be rejecting bids based on the companies already having demonstrated the ability to complete the same type of work. It smells of discrimination based on political affiliation, plain and simple. But in this case, it’s not even political affiliation. Most of these companies don’t give a fig about red vs blue. The color they care about is green. They take jobs from Republican and Democratic administrations with equal zeal.

Perhaps the #RESIST leaders on the San Diego City Council think they are sending a message or somehow punishing the President. They’re wrong. The only people they are punishing are the job creators and their employees who vie for work on approved government projects at all levels. In a more sane world, residents of the area who care about job creation would vote these clowns out of office at the first opportunity, but we’re talking about California here. They will once again cut off their own nose to spite their face.

If I were a large construction
company in San Diego, I’d be
p*ssed with being threatened.
Government contracts are these
companies’ bread and butter.
This could backfire on San Diego’s
political wild bunch, in that
local contractors could retaliate by
not bidding on any budgeted projects
the city of San Diego has planned.
Contractors don’t take political sides,
as they would just as soon build a bridge
in the reddest part of Texas, as the bluest part of New York.
It’s all about the $$ and putting food
on the table.
The Army Corps of Engineers should be
called in to build this section of wall.
I guess San Diego could hire a bunch
of illegals to complete their local
projects.

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